A Mighty Fortress (104 page)

Even as that thought crossed his mind, a hole punched itself abruptly through
Shield
’s main topsail. The range from
Shield
to the closest Dohlaran galleon was down to two hundred yards, at the most, Stywyrt thought, and wondered how much longer Aiwain was going to wait.

Harys Aiwain looked up as the round shot punched through
Shield
’s main top-sail with the sound of a giant, slapping fist. She’d taken at least three more hits on her way in, but so far, there was no report of casualties.
Shield
was a shorter, stubbier ship than
Dart
, a sister of HMS
Dreadnought
, the very first galleon designed as a warship from the keel up. She carried the same number of guns as
Dart
, although her battery was more cramped than the later, larger ship’s and her carronades were only thirty- pounders, and she was a bit slower under most conditions. Her frames and timbers, though, were heavier than those of any converted merchantman, and they’d stood up well to the handful of hits the Dohlarans had so far achieved.

Looks like Commodore Seamount was right about their powder being weaker than ours
, Aiwain thought.
Of course, it doesn’t hurt that their guns are lighter, to boot!

He knew at least some of the Dohlaran artillery was lighter, at any rate; all he had to do was peek over the hammock nettings and look down at the twelve- pound shot standing half- buried in his ship’s side just forward of her number twenty- seven gunport. He doubted any of his own thirty- pound shot would fail to penetrate when the time came.

Of course, as we get closer,
they’ll
start punching through, too
, he reflected.
That will be unpleasant
.

He looked across at the nearest Dohlaran. The range was coming down on a hundred yards, and he heard a sudden scream from below decks as at least one Dohlaran shot finally got through. He didn’t know whether it had penetrated
Shield
’s timbers or come through an open gunport, but whichever it had done, he didn’t doubt he was going to start taking more casualties very soon.

“Stand to, the larboard battery!” he shouted to Mohtohkai Daikhar, his first lieutenant.

Sir Dahrand Rohsail glowered into the blinding smoke as it cascaded back across HMS
Grand Vicar Mahrys
. He stood on the starboard poop deck ladder, three feet above the level of his quarterdeck, trying to see across the netted hammocks which formed a (hopefully) musket- proof barrier along the rail. At the moment, the stinking tide of smoke that spewed out with each broadside rendered his efforts to see anything more or less useless.

Rohsail’s fifty-gun ship was one of the first of the Royal Dohlaran Navy’s new- construction galleons, and he’d been more than a little surprised when he received command of her. He’d never made any secret of his personal allegiance to Duke Thorast, and he shared the duke’s dislike for the Earl of Thirsk to the full, if not for all the same reasons. Although Rohsail was never going to forget all he owed to Thorast’s patronage, he couldn’t deny—in the privacy of his own thoughts—that Thirsk had clearly been right and Duke Malikai had obviously been
wrong
before Rock Point. Anyone with the least awareness of how court politics worked knew it would have been foolish to expect Thorast to commit the disastrous folly of
admitting
his brother- in- law’s stupidity had pissed away almost the entire peacetime navy, yet even the duke must know it was true.
Rohsail
did, at any rate!

For that matter, the captain was willing to admit the advantages of the signal flags Thirsk had copied from the damned Charisians. The degree of control—of the ability to communicate between ships—they provided was priceless, and he shuddered to think of how things might have worked out if it had remained a Charisian monopoly. In fact, he’d been forced to concede Thirsk had a clearer, more realistic view than Thorast, in almost every respect, of the kinds of ships and tactics needed to knock those arrogant Charisian bastards back on their heels.

All that was true, and Rohsail knew it. But he also knew the earl was systematically gutting the Navy in the process. He was promoting
commoners
over nobles, insisting
gentlemen
had to accept “schooling” from uncouth, low- born
merchant seamen
, like Ahndair Krahl, of the
Bedard
. He was undermining discipline with his foolish restrictions on how it could be enforced. And this madness of his, requiring a seaman’s wage be paid directly to his family, if that was his choice, when he was at sea. And that it had to be paid in full and on time!

Rohsail had no objection to paying the men their wages . . . eventually. But money was always tight. Sometimes decisions had to be made about where to spend limited funds, and seamen aboard a warship didn’t have anything to spend money
on
, which made not paying them until the end of the commission a reasonable way to husband scanty funds. Of course, sometimes they couldn’t be paid immediately after a ship paid off, anyway, but there were al-ways brokers willing to buy up their delayed wages for a twenty percent commission or so. And if a man got himself killed at sea—which was bound to happen fairly frequently—the Navy didn’t have to pay
anyone
, now did it? But not according to Thirsk!

Even without the insanity of lifetime pensions for widows and orphans, insisting wages be paid immediately to a man’s family was going to play hell with the Navy’s finances in the fullness of time.
Mother Church
might be able to afford it, but there was no way the Kingdom of Dohlar could continue the practice once the heretics were crushed. And who was going to end up being blamed and hated by the common lower- deck scum when it had to be abandoned? Not Earl Thirsk, that was for certain! No, it would be left to Duke Thorast to clean up the mess, and they’d be lucky if they avoided mutinies in the process.

And when that happens, the way Thirsk’s cut the balls off navy discipline isn’t going to help one bit, either
, Rohsail thought grimly.
“The lash can’t make a bad seaman good, but it
can
make a good seaman bad,” indeed! The lash is all most of them really
understand
! The way Thirsk’s sucking up to them is going to leave all of us even deeper in the shit when it comes time to clean up behind him
.

But this wasn’t the time to pick fights with the man Vicar Allayn and Vicar Zhaspahr had selected to command the Dohlaran Navy. That time would come once the disastrous consequences of Thirsk’s more outlandish policies became apparent, and Rohsail was rather looking forward to that day of comeuppance. In the meantime, though, there was a war to fight, and as insane as Earl Thirsk might be in altogether too many ways, at least he understood what had to be done if that war was going to be won.

Grand Vicar Mahrys
heaved as she blasted yet another broadside into the smoke, and Rohsail smiled thinly as he pictured what that torrent of iron must be doing to its target.

I wish I could
see
the damned thing
, he admitted to himself.
Still, I can see the
masts
, and the rest of the frigging ship has to be somewhere under them!

He snorted in harsh amusement at the thought and climbed the rest of the way up the ladder to the poop deck. He’d be more exposed from there, but maybe he could actually
see
something up to windward.

A fresh Dohlaran broadside came howling in. This one was better aimed, and Harys Aiwain watched a round shot carve its way through the midships bulwark. Splinters of shattered planking, some of them three feet long or more, went hissing across the deck, and tatters of shredded canvas flapped wildly as the shot tore through the tightly rolled hammocks standing on end and netted between the stanchions atop the bulwark. Two men went down on the number five carronade. One of them hit the sanded deck limply in a splattered spiderweb of blood, but the other screamed, clutching at the jagged splinter standing out of his right shoulder. Someone dragged the wounded man clear, and two men from the starboard battery—one each from number six and number eight carronades—moved quickly to replace the casualties.

The captain absorbed all those details, as well as the fresh holes appearing in his fore topsail and a length of shrouds blowing sideways in the wind as it was clipped off by yet another round shot. But he absorbed them with only a corner of his brain; the rest of his attention was focused on the third ship in the Dohlaran line. She was almost directly opposite
Shield
now, and no more than fifty yards away. He waited a moment longer, and then his sword slashed downward.

“
Fire!
”

Shield
fired on the downroll.

In point of fact, Captain Aiwain’s range estimate had been slightly off; the actual distance to
Grand Vicar Mahrys
was only forty yards, and the avalanche of
Shield
’s fire crashed into Rohsail’s ship with devastating effectiveness. Despite the fact that
Grand Vicar Mahrys
had been designed and built as a warship, her frames and timbers weren’t as heavy as
Shield
’s, and the thirty- pound Charisian round shot sledgehammered through them with contemptuous ease, slamming across the Dohlaran’s gundeck in butchering fans of splinters.

Aiwain’s gunners were far more experienced than Rohsail’s. They could see their target more clearly, and they were better judges of their own ship’s motion, as well, and they timed
Shield
’s roll almost perfectly. Despite the short range, despite their experience, a great many of their shots managed to miss, anyway. Only someone who’d actually fired a smoothbore cannon in the midst of the smoke and thunder and howling chaos of a naval battle could truly realize just how difficult it actually was to hit something the size of an enemy warship under those circumstances, even at relatively short range. But far
fewer
of
Shield
’s gun crews missed their target, and none of their fire went high. Every hit smashed into their target’s hull, and they were close enough to hear the screams.